NGO urges better condition for physically challenged in schools

The Abuja Coordinator, Save the Deaf and Endangered Languages Initiative, Miss Kindness Okoro, has called for better condition for handicapped children in government schools. .

Okoro made the call during the visit of the group and some parents to the Abuja School for the Deaf and Dumb in Kuje, FCT, on Thursday.

The Principal of the school, Mr Onoja Edache, who received the group, thanked them “for finding time to see how the children are faring”.

Edache, however, lamented that some parents did not care for their children as they only dumped them and never cared to come back for them.

“I find it difficult to understand why some parents will just abandon their children here. There is a limit to which we can do for them,’’ he said.

He also said that government alone could not meet the needs and requirement of the special pupils.

An investigation by the News Agency of Nigeria found that the school depends on the goodwill of NGOs, religious bodies and philanthropists to feed the over six hundred pupils of the school.

The school comprises vulnerable children of between four and twenty one years of age.

Other checks on the facilities available in the school revealed that the sanitary condition of the school’s hostels was also not good.

It was also gathered that other facilities in the school such as the ICT and Skills Acquisition Workshop lie fallow.

A Director at the FCT Universal Basic Education Board, Dr Adamu Noma, who spoke to NAN on the issue however, said, “We are taking adequate care of the pupils. The deaf and dumb school pupils in Kuje are special children. We do not have a problem we are doing the best we can within the available resources’’.

“With regard to feeding, we have a time table, you don’t expect to feed as if you are in your own house,” Noma said.

He said further, “if there is any problem at all, it has to do with the fact that the FCT budget has not been passed.”